1. Field of the Invention
The disclosed embodiments of the present invention relate to image processing, and more particularly, to an image processing method using a local brightness gain to process an image for enhancing image quality and a related image processing apparatus.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Image enhancement, such as image contrast or dynamic range enhancement, may be employed in the image processing by adjusting the image brightness. However, the image brightness adjustment may be accompanied by image noise. One conventional method for reducing the image noise is to perform noise reduction upon the image according to the same parameter. When the denoise level is higher, the edge level would be lower (i.e. the image details of the image may blur or disappear); otherwise, the image noise may still be high in order to keep/enhance the image details. Therefore, when different image blocks in an image are processed by different brightness adjustment operations to enhance the image quality, the noise reduction performed upon the image may make image details blurred/lost or result in insufficient noise reduction in some image blocks.
Thus, how to reduce the image noise without blurring/losing the image details after the image enhancement operation is performed upon the image by locally adjusting image brightness has become a problem needed to be resolved.